The enormous number of stored electronic documents and other information resources available in modern communications networks such as the Internet poses particular problems for classification and categorisation. For example, the world wide web provides access to an ever-increasing number of electronic documents, many of them generated dynamically, and it is often difficult to retrieve a document of interest without knowing in advance at least part of an identifier, address or locator for the resource. For this reason, search engines have been developed which attempt to generate lists of relevant documents in response to keywords typed in by a user. However, such searches are limited by the choice of keywords entered by the user. As an alternative, directories of web resources have been created by manual vetting and categorisation of web documents into hierarchical category structures known as web directories. These directories are extremely useful for locating relevant documents once a particular category has been chosen. However, the development of these directories is a challenge in itself. For example, companies such as Yahoo! have employed more than 300 people for maintaining the structure of their online directory. This level of expenditure is not justifiable for most companies. More recently, some solutions have appeared which replace the manual vetting with automatic classification based on a manually created taxonomy. Although this alleviates the problem to some extent, the manpower needed to create and maintain the appropriate taxonomy is still considerable. It is desired, therefore, to provide an improved system and process for generating a taxonomy for information resources in a communications network, or at least a useful alternative.